Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  At John’s entry the surgeon, who was sitting there like a moustached Mayo girl at some piece of folk-sewing, began to whistle quietly to himself because he now had an audience. The theatre sister was in the sterilizing room, the patient was only locally anaesthetized, there were no housemen about and Cloate was obviously happy. He took no notice of John at all, which was annoying because at this moment he had for him a kind of holiness. His idle dexterity in flaking off the gleaming foils of skin with time enough, and assurance, to whistle and ignore became the grossest insult. A good surgeon and young, translated now from out-patients’ theatre to three rolls on the hall porter’s gong and to the Sweepstake wing with its rubbered corridors, autoclaves, shadowless lights and terrazzo walls, a coming name but a nasty little man and frightening too.

  John watched him for a moment, with the swiftly assumed humility of the student in the presence of the consultant, and tasted hatred like vinegar in his mouth as he visualized Cloate’s complicit smile for Groarke if Groarke had entered in his stead. He realized for the first time how much he resented their relationship and how little he understood it. And Cloate whispered, “Tell sister I want her and then get out,” without so much as looking up.

  There was something wrong here on a scale which rose out of the personal and tinged the general. Writing of it, a sharp rancour, a real malice crept into John’s picture of the hospital. What had begun as a light satire gradually became a vicious destruction not only of the values of Mungo Park Hospital but of all the Dublin hospitals. He contrasted the ideal hospital of his imaginings with those of his experience, bringing out through his descriptions the dwarfed morality of the consultants who staffed them. He became so excited by the words and ideas pouring out onto the paper before him, by the suddenly discovered power of analysis and suggestion, that he tore up all he had written, took a fresh sheaf of foolscap and started again at the beginning.

  He imagined his narrator showing a sagacious but untutored visitor round a typical Dublin Hospital, starting with a description of the proclamatory gong beats clattering through the Victorian wards.

  He sketched in portraits of the consultant staff arriving in their large cars, the flutter of sisters, nurses and students round each man, the foibles of the physicians, the manifest vanity of the surgeons, the dreadful shaming of the patients between broad medical humour on the one hand and technical pomposity on the other.

  His visitor asked more and more penetrating questions, incredulous and dismayed; his narrator, bland, self-assured and the self-victimized product of the system, made more and more of an odious fool of himself in his attempts to defend.

  An authentic picture of Freddie Gibson losing his temper during a bowel resection before an audience of foreign students, kicking buckets across the tiled floor and blaspheming over the shrouded anaesthetized figure of the patient, was followed by an account of Macdonald Browne giving a talk on the placenta with all the coarseness of a drunken vet.

  Senior students and housemen were lightly lampooned; outpatients from the slums were herded into gleaming “sweep”—subsidized departments waiting in silence for consultants to press their desk buzzer and buttons; corpses were wheeled to mortuaries through a barrage of intolerable jokes, pathologists fumbled in old-fashioned laboratories with specimens from countless biopsies; venereal clinics in gas-lighted outhouses with outdated equipment queued long for injections and lavage.

  Finally a remedy was sketched in. Not only the bulldozing of the hospitals squatting in their slums followed by the proper expenditure of the money on airy buildings in green belts, not only slum clearance and judicious birth control, but a course in philosophy, aesthetics and Confucian behaviour for all consultants before they were allowed to take up public appointments.

  When he eventually got to bed he felt so light that he fancied without the bedclothes he might have floated up to the ceiling with a few lazy strokes and out through the window into Botany Bay.

  He went through the transitions of his paper with a kind of delight which he had never known before. It was like thinking about Dymphna when things were going well; yet it was better because there was no chance of the paper later causing him pain. But more than this, there was a quality in most of it which he knew transcended the drudgery and ordinariness of all his earlier writing. Re-reading certain passages he became like Aladdin in the cave; the gleam of light from the antique lamp suddenly revealing sparkling treasure in the accustomed darkness, a sense of all things owed to him having been suddenly repaid. He thought, Beyond all I superficially know and experience, not a grain can fall to the ground uncounted. These jewels of pleasure and pain which burn in the darkness are building slowly all the time and I have access to them at will. Greenbloom was right. I am a writer.

  The next day when he had finished his lectures and clinics he went down to the gymnasium, changed and put on boxing gloves. He spent an hour hitting the punch bag, skipping and shadow-boxing, then had a cold shower and returned, glowing, to a revision of all he had written the night before. In places it struck him that he had gone too far and he discovered that with the greatest facility he was able to replace overstatement by accurate satire without in the least lessening either mordancy or wit. He knew again the sense of mastery he had experienced the night before, finding that he had only to seek a certain concept for a flood of words, of synonyms, of alternative phrases to present themselves and be transferred to the paper beneath his hand. He carefully made the consultants just unprovably recognizable, he touched his description of Mungo Park’s in such a way that it loured like an archetype over all the city’s hospitals: equivocal, dark, dreadful, an institution created not so much out of malice as out of stupidity.

  Here and there he detected touches of Erewhonian description, similarities to the earlier novels of Cronin, but in the main the hospital he had created was his own and the men who brilliantly gambolled, cursed and joked their way through its wards and departments, grotesque masks of their human prototypes: skilled, absurd, a little sinister, not quite identifiable either to their enemies or to their friends, least of all to themselves, though certainly discernible to the students to whom, after all, the paper was addressed.

  Any other misgivings he may have had were covered by his remembrance that the Association had itself awarded its silver medal to Margaret May in the preceding year for a paper which had made great fun of the Baggott Street staff. In assessing this he did not consciously remember that the prizewinner was both a Dubliner herself and extremely pretty; but in any case his delight in his newly found talent blinded him to any further dangers which he might incur from it.

  Each evening during the remainder of that week he trained sedulously in the gymnasium. He met a whole different set of students, or of students radically changed by enthusiasm. There was Condor, a great dullard in his own year who was fitness-mad. He bounded round the playing fields with towels round his neck, his long ostrich legs flashing over the grass; he knocked the punch bag about so fast that it could only be heard, he skipped like a great rosy girl and had bottles of liniment for every sort of sprained tendon and pulled muscle. There was Kerruish from the South, the wickedest southpaw in the Universities, whose favourite trick it was to start off a fight right-handed and then floor his opponent with a straight left as sudden as an Act of God. There was also a quiet man named Cosby who was reading modern languages and practising Buddhism.

  These and four or five others, when they saw that John’s visits to their building were earnestly regular, adopted him much as the Salvation Army adopts a person who wanders once too often into one of their temples. Kerruish knocked him about in the ring once a week and put him down to fight in the Novice’s Welterweight at the end of term; Condor taught him footwork and wall drill, Cosby instructed him in breathing exercises and the attainment of what he called “one-pointedness” of mind.

  Nobody, except Kerruish, discussed medicine, women or books; everyone except Kerruish measured their chests and what they drank. K
erruish, being the Inter-Universities champion, could discuss what he liked. He had the broad forehead and the curled hair of a bull, out of a square dimpled jaw his teeth gleamed whiter than a negro’s and his shoulders were so hunched with muscle that it was said he’d been born carrying a sack of wheat. He came from a small farm in Oughterard and was a catholic of terrible propensity, having a score of girls, a great devotion to the children of Fátima and plentiful supplies of money. He was in the year ahead of John and gave him generous advice about Dymphna.

  “When we’ve made a man of you, that one’ll never know what hit her. What’s the good of a girl marrying English brains if there’s no Irish hammer to the nail? It’s good to be clever but it’s better to be fit; that way you don’t need to think all the time. Come out in the ring now and knock me down.”

  “You know damn well I can’t.”

  “When Dymphna sees you flooring some other fellow in the Novices’ she’ll take you home and d’you know what she’ll do for you?”

  “No.”

  “Sure, she’ll buy you a Knight’s tie,” said Kerruish, putting his head back. “What did you think I was going to say?”

  “I’m not a Knight,” John said.

  “Then I’ll make you one. Only one word from me and t’would be enough. You’d be an all-rounder, brains and brawn. You’ve only to knock down someone in the Novices and you’ll be one of us. A few more weeks, a bit more in your right glove and you’ll make a pretty welter for me to second—personally.”

  “Who would I have to fight?”

  “We’d put you in against someone boned like yourself. You could scrap well with Cosby, he’s a book boy, too, trying to walk round his own shadow.”

  “All right.”

  “Well from now on then, no more sparring with him. Fighting’s like making love, you’ve to save for it.”

  Groarke was grim about all this. “Face it,” he said, “you’ll never be a muscle man, you’ve got a pathological squint. It’s Wimpole Street for us, where the thoughtful sort hang up their plates; we’ll never make the rugger and sex of Harley Street.”

  “Kerruish thinks—”

  “Who’s Kerruish? He’ll end up in the Indian Medical Service and be pensioned off with cirrhosis by the time he’s fifty.”

  “I work better for it,” John said.

  “When? When you’ve finished writing for the Bi and the Phil? When you’ve finished going to every dance advertised in Front Gate and floating out your money on White Ladies and flowers?” Groarke had stopped too late and they both walked into the pause, the silence which followed, like people stepping off into the gutter for one another. They looked at each other and looked away again.

  “I’m grateful to you, Mike,” John said, “We’ve done well together and you’ve helped, but I’ve got to do things, find them out.”

  “One thing’s enough. If you’d less money you’d know what you’ve got in having your fees sitting in the bank. There’s only two years to go now before we qualify. You should wait until after that.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “Exhibitionism, trying to live six different lives in the space of one; Ffynch and the Ranelagh Club, the Phil and the Bi and now this muscle stuff.”

  John said, “I saw Cloate a day or two ago, he was bloody rude to me.”

  “You’re getting yourself a name,” Groarke said, “they smell cod.”

  “Then to hell with them. I’m English, we’ve no time for all this cratching and snarling. If I got into the Ranelagh Club it’s not my fault; if I happen to be able to write and get noticed for what I’ve done by the Phil there’s no ground for resentment. When they see that I can do the same thing in the Bi, constructively, they may change their ideas. They’ll realize then that all my interests are centred on medicine, that although I may look like a playboy I’m in earnest—and in any case I don’t see much of Ffynch now and scarcely ever go into the Club.”

  “Gill, Moffatt, Macdonald Browne all know you’re a member. They’ve been cracks about it in the Miscellany. There’s only one doctor ever been elected and he was a regius professor. Your best hope is to stick to the course and keep quiet, you’re too much talked about.”

  “You’ll have me paranoid.”

  “It’s not a bad thing,” Groarke said, “for a noisy Englishman when Finals are round the corner.”

  That night was a Thursday and John took his paper into Davy Byrnes’. There were a lot of the Boat Club in there, and with them, Kerruish.

  “Blaydon’s going to fight welter in the Novices. Isn’t he the man for us now? What are you drinking, John, and what’s that you have with you?”

  “A letter from Dymphna Uprichard,” one of them said. “No, it’s his paper for the Bi. Let’s hear some of it.”

  But he did not start to read it until he’d had a drink or two. He had been round to the flat and seen Collins’ M.G. outside and Broyle’s bicycle fastened to the railings with a little chain.

  All that Groarke had said and many things which he had not said had contributed to the dark storms which overlay the climate of his love for Dymphna. The club had proved distasteful, a totally unreal world of enormous static armchairs, idling like the members themselves in an environment that had nothing to do with rewards or work.

  “Come on,” they said, “we heard your last to the Phil, it was a killer. What’re you going to give the Bi tomorrow night?”

  They got into a corner and he read them the section on Gibson doing the jejunal resection. When he had finished everyone stood him drinks.

  “What did I tell you?” said Kerruish. “He’s got words, has this one. They’ll all be jumping round on one foot when they hear that. Give us that bit on the placenta again where old Bethelgert gets up and interrupts Macdonald Browne about infarction.”

  “No,” said somebody else, “let him read on a bit.” Lynch demanded the beginning, Rafferty wanted the end, but Kerruish said, “Have you not given Cloate a pasting? You’d not go wrong there with that little cod always after other men’s wives. Did I tell you I met him in the Theatre Royal one evening last week?”

  “You told us, Jack,” everyone shouted.

  They talked on a little longer and then most of them left to go down to the Dolphin for steak and chips; but Lynch, a pale man with a very involved and solemn way of talking, hung back and suggested that he and John go to eat somewhere quietly together. They cut across Dawson Street to a small restaurant where there was a bright fire and few patrons. Lynch said, “I’ll stand you dinner. That stuff of yours is good.”

  “D’you think it is?”

  “You know it is, don’t you? You must do. If someone does a thing well it stands to reason they must know about it. It’s very involved really, but what I want to say is that performance whether it’s practical or aesthetic is it’s own arbiter. Take Joyce for instance; that bit in the Dubliners where they’re arguing about the sermon by the Jesuit and one of them keeps on passing wind and the other—”

  “I haven’t read Joyce yet,” John said. “Somehow I always seem to be more interested in what I’m thinking myself, though sometimes when I do read someone good I get a feeling of tremendous excitement.”

  “Exactly! That’s the artist in you.”

  Lynch talked at great length, very pale; and sweating himself, with a slow sort of excitement. As he talked, a great bitterness seemed to be welling out of him and with the bitterness a most remote but persistent appeal for applause. He reached various very involved epigrammatic passages in what he was saying and paused each time expectantly. John, bewildered, tried to look impressed and Lynch became more and more incoherent and excited. But eventually he said, “Get that thing of yours out and lay it on the table; we’ll go through it together and I’ll tell you where you’re falling off and where you ought to rewrite. Those other Philistines don’t realize that it’s more than a jape, that it’s a very powerful satire. Now take those descriptions of yours, in some of them you’re just playing with y
ourself, aren’t you, Blaydon, holding yourself back?”

  “Perhaps, yes, I think you’re right.”

  “Well, don’t. It’s irresponsible. Cut right down into it. Forget the belly-laughers and hit out at the shams and the cods, tear the hospital wide open so that you’ll be taken seriously.”

  “It’s too risky.”

  “Only if you stop halfway,” Lynch said. “Have another drink. You’ve got to realize that lack of conviction is the real danger, you’ll please no one if you hang back. I happen to know that if they can, they’re going to pull you apart tomorrow night. The Bethelgert clique think you’ve had it too easy in the Phil and they’re going to slow-clap and moan at your jokes. Mike Groarke’s been putting it about that you imagine you’re going to have them by the short hairs without committing yourself.”

  After a drink or two more John consented. With Lynch’s prompting he saw the paper in a different light; it was going to be a genuine test of his ability and of his convictions. Together they worked through it paragraph by paragraph. After the good meal and the copious drinks, words seemed to flow ever more easily; new ideas, manners of presenting the deepest misgivings about the functions of hospitals in general and of Mungo Park’s in particular, came to him with an electric facility.

  At eleven o’clock, with the paper substantially reconstructed, with all that had been left out now most vividly replaced, Lynch professed himself satisfied.

  They went back to John’s rooms with the momentary sense that in discovering the full measure of his talent they had also discovered something most rare and valuable in themselves. Lynch admitted that although he was in his final year he had long been a regular follower of John’s activities in the Phil and that he had always felt he had a brilliant future ahead of him. He suggested that so far John’s only mistake had lain in his selection of the wrong friends.